I have made mention quite a few time over the course of the last several years of an intellectual contraption called "THE TRIPOD". This evening, WonderWife and I were talking about it, and she mentioned to me that I might want to tell folks what I meant by that. She understands the concept, and I would like everyone else to understand it as well. It’s not a new concept, but I never thought that I’d see it happening here. I was mistaken. And it is leading us all down a very grim path.

It's a really simple concept. All civilizations fight the same fights all the time, between the oligarchs and the plutocrats and the (for want of a better word) plebes. The haves and the have-nots. You can got back through history and find these struggles all over the place. The most recent example of this, of course, is the "Arab Spring" of Egypt and the overthrow of the Libyan dictatorship. It's happening now in Syria, and we helped to put a stop to SOME of it in Afghanistan.

All of these struggles rest on a tripod base. This consists of the three things that will stop all dissent from taking place. First leg: HUNGER. Keep a population more concerned with having enough food to feed themselves and their families with just enough money to get by. Second leg: IGNORANCE. Make sure that you (the ruling class) dumb down the schools to the lowest common denominator. Third leg: Misinformation. Lie and lie and LIE about what's going on, and do it so loudly that nobody else can be heard.

Leg #1, of course, is getting rid of inconvenient things like labour unions, collective bargaining and minimum wage standards. After all, if a populace actually has enough money to buy food and provide living quarters AND leisure time to self-educate by reading, well, GOSH - they might get uppity and demand things. Like, say, decent educations that are affordable for their children. If there's not quite enough money to go around without a person working a 60 hour work week, then what do you think is going to be more important to that person, especially if there are children involved? And even now, the Federal food stamp program is under attack - for being too expensive.

Leg #2 is another way to keep a fractious population under control. After all, if the public school system is run by people whose sole job is not to educate, but to teach to a standardized test to graduate students, who are the ones that suffer? I DO NOT BLAME THE TEACHERS. Or the principals of the public school systems in this country, because they themselves are under attack. Surprize, surprize - if not for the labour unions, there wouldn't be any way for a teacher to be able to do anything about the stupidities that the school administrations are capable of. Look, for example, at Detroit. Or Texas. Make sure that the texts are dumbed down to the point that most of what the kids learn is on the extremely simplistic general lines of "OH OH OH LOOK LOOK LOOK SEE SPOT RUN", and what do you think happens? Gosh, there are a lot of kiddos graduated that are at best functional illiterates. I do not approve of either the magnet school programs or the charter school programs, because they are private schools that are run at state and taxpayer expense, and which are principally designed to separate the best and brightest students and teachers from the general school populations while leaving the not-so-intellectually gifted behind to wallow in mediocrity.

Leg #3 is slanting the news programs one way or the other. Misinforming people doesn't always come under the heading of lies. It also comes under the heading of opinions that are pretending to be objective reporting. The only objective reportage that I've seen lately has been over the SCOTUS decision about the Affordable Care Act. The only other objective reportage is what's coming out of the war zones. Then, of course, you also have the "infotainers", because after all, we're too STUPID to know what to think until we've been TOLD what to think. Incidentally, this is why I worked for, voted for and truly love our President. He expects us to come up to his level of competence.

And this, gangers, is what makes the unelected oligarchs and the plutocrats so very dangerous. I do not like what’s been happening in MY COUNTRY for the last 30 or so years. I do not like people like Paul Ryan saying that the poor and the middle class have too many privileges like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP and food stamps. I don’t like people like the Koch brothers cynically assuming that they can buy the Senate, the House and the Presidency and use those bodies to ensure that we all fall in line in their vision of the future: organized peonage of anybody that isn’t white, rich and religious. I HATE that ACLU backed the Citizens United lawsuit which is making it possible, finally, for the tripod to become an accepted FACT of our lives.

So, what do we do? Damned if I know – but I do know this: An educated populace is anathema to all dictators and tyrants. An educated populace that is engaged in fighting for our rights as guaranteed to us in the Constitution is anathema to those who would deny us the freedom to choose for ourselves where we want to go as a country. An educated, informed populace is an abomination to those who would rather see anyone that isn’t exactly like them dead. We’re already seeing that those who would deny us are not having it all their own way these days, but as Ben Franklin said so many years ago, if we are not prepared to fight for our freedoms, then we will lose them.

If we aren’t willing to do away with the tripod, and we aren’t willing to openly fight for ourselves, then we deserve to lose our freedoms. I hope that that doesn’t happen here. I hope that we don't come to the point of bloody revolution here as has happened elsewhere.

I hope.